‘Island: A Story of the Galápagos,’ by Jason Chin

Writing scientific narrative nonfiction for young children is challenge enough, but creating engaging picture books for older children about the natural world isn’t easy either. How to pull in the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” reader? Credit to Jason Chin, who succeeded at both in “Coral Reefs” (2011) and “Redwoods” (2009). He does so again in his latest, “Island: A Story of the Galápagos.”

Chin’s remarkable introduction to the Galápagos is not just a story. It’s a biography. It begins with an island’s “birth” six million years ago. “A volcano has been growing under the ocean for millions of years,” Chin writes. “With this eruption it rises above the water for the first time, and a new island is born.” In full-page watercolor paintings and small-size panel illustrations, Chin shows how the tremendous explosion leaves a mass of lava, which hardens and grows into an island. Any reader who has ever made a homemade “volcano” out of baking soda will be hooked.

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From “Island: A Story of the Galápagos”

Chin, as author-illustrator, melds geology with evolution, showing how the land and its inhabitants interact and shape one another in a natural-world interplay. We see how a few intrepid immigrant animals arrive, colonize and transform themselves to accommodate the particular features of their new home. The island grows and changes too as new eruptions lead to the appearance of other nearby islands, while eruptions on the original island grow infrequent, and then cease.

Throughout, Chin’s sumptuous watercolors evoke the landscape and its evolving menagerie of birds, tortoises and land iguanas. New species continue to find their way to the island outpost, whether lost, escaped or driven away from their birthplaces. With directness and simplicity, Chin describes the forces that enact change over time; a sequence explaining how the native finch population tends to favor larger beaks is an expertly rendered vision of Darwinism.

Then comes a surprise: The island we’ve been tracking is not part of the Galápagos we know today. It shrinks and then disappears beneath the waves, survived by 15 other large islands in the vicinity collectively known by that name, so closely associated with Charles Darwin. (He is shown on the Beagle visiting the islands in 1835.) And so we see not only what grows and develops, but also what becomes obsolete and disappears. Much of this is explored in appendixes on Darwin, the islands and the islands’ endemic species. A certain amount of the chronology, Chin explains, is necessarily speculative. But it’s based on the best and most recent available science. And here, that science is gracefully combined with superb illustrative art.